T he Look of Love

THE ART OF THE

ROMANCE NOVEL

by Jennifer McKnight-T rontz

Princeton Architectural Press New York

Published by

PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS37 East Seventh StreetNew York, NY 10003

For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657.Visit our web site at www.papress.com.

©2002 Princeton Architectural PressAll rights reservedPrinted and bound in the United States05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without writ-ten permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Editor: Mark LamsterBook design: Jennifer McKnight-TrontzCover design: Deb WoodProofreading: Noel Millea

Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Ann Alter, Amanda Atkins, Nicola Bednarek,Janet Behning, Megan Carey, Penny Chu, Jan Cigliano, Jane Garvie, Tom Hutten, Clare Jacobson, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Anne Nitschke,Evan Schoninger, Lottchen Shivers, and Jennifer Thompson of Princeton Architectural Press—Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Credits: Ann Kenyon: Surgeon, White Fawn, Afterglow, The Moon’s Our Home,Golden Earrings, Self-Made Woman, Home Town Doctor, Sons of the Sheik, KindAre Her Answers, Skyscrapers, and Return to Night used by permission of DellPublishing, a division of Random House, Inc. Quality, The Doctor Is a Lady, ANurse on Horseback, Women Will Be Doctors, Nurse into Woman, Symphony in theSky, and Illusions used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of RandomHouse, Inc. Pocket Books featured by permission of Simon & Schuster. BriefGolden Time, A Baronet’s Wife, and Devil’s Mansion courtesy of Warner Books.Fair Stranger, General Duty Nurse, Doctor in Bondage, Desert Nurse, NurseBarlow, The Hospital in Buwambo, Wife by Arrangement, Corporation Boss, FirstLove Last Love, Scorched Wings, Strange Bedfellow, Tabitha In Moonlight, TheTender Night, and I’ll Be with You courtesy of Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.Linda’s Champion Cocker, Doctor Myra Comes Home, Once Upon A Summer, TheDoctors, Society Doctor, and Air Stewardess used by permission of Avalon Books.The Barbarian Lover by Margaret Pedler and Shadow of Roses by HerminaBlack used by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataMcKnight-Trontz, Jennifer.

The look of love : the art of the romance novel / by JenniferMcKnight-Trontz.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 1-56898-312-3 (alk. paper)1. Book jackets--United States--Design--Catalogs. 2. Illustration

of books--United States--Catalogs. 3. Romance fiction--UnitedStates--History--20th century. I. Title.

NC1882 .M39 2002741.6'4'0973075--dc21

2001005122

INTRODUCTION 9

HAPPILY EVER AFTER 35

59 WOMAN ON HER WAY

71 BAD GIRLS & GOOD GIRLS

87 LOVES OF A NURSE

HOMETOWN DOCTOR 107

TIME PASSAGES 117

EXOTIC ENCOUNTERS 127

BIBLIOGRAPHY 142

49 PASSIONS AFLAME

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7

I thank all of the authors whose books are included here for bringing

so much pleasure to so many women, despite the wrath of critics; the

art directors and illustrators who created these wonderful covers;

and the publishers who built the romance book industry. I am partic-

ularly grateful for the assistance of Shelley Cinnamon at Harlequin

Books, Robert Maguire, Robert McGinnis, and Gary Lovisi. Thanks

also to editor Mark Lamster and Princeton Architectural Press for

taking on this labor of love.

Acknowledgments

9

In the 1940s, the advent of the mass-market paperback forever

altered the publishing industry and changed the way countless

millions of readers consumed fiction. Offering hungry audiences

popular entertainment rather than more rarified forms of literature,

the new softcover books bore few pretensions and were sold for pen-

nies at stores and shops of all kinds. Their fantastic tales of adven-

ture, crime, mystery, and romance allowed readers a bit of escape

from the tedium and regimentation of modern life.

If men were attracted to tales of sex and violence, women wanted

romance, and the pocketbook-friendly paperback proved an ideal for-

mat. From prim and proper tales of refined ladies and gentlemen to

daring and bold stories of love and longing, women lost themselves in

the pulp-paper pages of their romance novels. For a slightly lighter

change purse, the worlds of the rich, the beautiful, the notorious, and

the innocent were theirs to have, if only for a day—or a few minutes a

day. In an era before sexual liberation and the Pill, romances offered

female readers a taste of illicit freedom. And with so many options to

choose from, the bright, colorful covers of romance novels became cru-

cial sales tools for their publishers. An entire genre of fiction was sold

based on the premise that you could, in fact, tell a book by its cover.

Introduction

Though tame by today’s standards—and in comparison to the

more racy paperbacks produced for contemporary male audiences—

the early romances were fairly provocative. Over time, however, the

books became more explicit, and sales rose with the added heat.

Published in increasing numbers since the 1940s, by the 1970s the

paperback romance novel had blossomed into a worldwide phenome-

non. Romance readers did not require elaborate plotting, complex

character development, or deft handling of language from their

authors. They were more than happy with stories whose purple prose

stuck to a basic formula: woman meets man, complications arise,

obstacles are overcome, the two lovers marry.

Romance fiction and paperbacks were not entirely new in the 1940s—

women had been reading romance novels for centuries. The Brontë

sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were bestsellers in the 1800s.

Hardcover editions of romance novels with subdued, artfully illus-

trated covers were widely enjoyed by women in the early part of the

twentieth century. Romance authors such as Faith Baldwin and

Margaret Mitchell enjoyed tremendous popularity during the 1930s.

And the paperback, too, existed in some form throughout the nine-

teenth century in the United States and Europe in the guise of penny

dreadfuls, dime novels, and cheap libraries.

The first English-language, mass-market paperback was indeed

a romance, Malaeska by Ann S. Stephens, published in June 1860 by

Erastus and Irwin Beadle, pioneers of the dime novel. The success of

this romantic tale (it sold sixty-five thousand copies within a few

months of publication) of an Indian princess was such that it helped

launch a whole new genre in publishing. These early dime novels usu-

ally featured a paper cover with a simple woodcut illustration depict-

ing a scene from the story. Though these books flourished for a time,

THE LOOK OF LOVE10

INTRODUCTION 11

PUBLISHED IN 1949, The Manatee wasthe first title from the Canadian publishing house Harlequin Books.Harlequins are now printed in twenty-four languages.

THE LOOK OF LOVE12

sensational pulp magazines exploring the same terrain

(Westerns, crime, and romance) eclipsed them in popularity

beginning in the 1890s. In the 1930s a few paperback publishers

existed, such as Boni, Modern Age Books, and American

Mercury Books, but their success was to be short-lived.

It was not until Robert de Graff’s Pocket Books debuted in

1939 that mass-market paperbacks and romances came of age. De

Graff believed he could make a success of his paperbound, 4.25-

by-6-inch “Pocket Books” by selling them like magazines—in

bookstores, newsstands, drugstores, and cigar stores. By keep-

ing production costs low (with newer, more efficient presses) and

by selling hundreds of thousands of copies through a well-organ-

ized distribution system, their price could be kept to just 25

cents, a bargain, even then.

By 1943, numerous other publishers had launched similar

lines, such as Bantam Books (sold from vending machines),

Avon, Popular Library, Dell, and New American Library, but as

historian Janice Radway has noted, “it was de Graff’s ability to

institute this system on a large scale that set the stage for the

romance’s rise to dominance within the mass-market industry.”1

What stood out about these new paperbacks, compared to higher-

brow softcovers, such as those from the British publisher

Penguin, were their attractive, eye-catching covers that were

designed to lure potential readers into the stories. They were also

less expensive. The Penguin books, under the design direction of

legendary modernist typographer Jan Tschichold, were relative-

ly subdued in their cover art, often featuring only the title of the

book between orange bands. By the end of the 1940s, Penguin’s

American branch began to feature full-color cover illustrations,

though its parent company in England did not follow suit until

the 1960s.

INTRODUCTION 13

As nearly all early paperbacks were reprints of hardcover

editions, the paperback publishers competed aggressively for

reprint rights. As late as 1955 only one-third of paperbacks were

originals. Hardcover publishers, such as Dodd, Mead &

Company, Thomas Bouregy & Company, and Doubleday provided

much of the content to the paperback romance houses. The first

serious challenge to Pocket Books’ almost exclusive control of

cheap reprint book sales was Avon’s “pocket-sized” series. Its

romance line included such saucy titles as The Hard-Boiled

Virgin, Kept Woman, and The Abortive Hussy. Most were fun romps

through the loves of well-bred urbanites, as in Katharine Brush’s

Young Man of Manhattan: “Ann Vaughn and Toby McLean thought

they were just made for each other. She was vivacious, peppy, and

a writer for the Star. He was a zesty reporter on the same paper.

When these two healthy young people met one rainy afternoon—

a sparkling brunette and a handsome ex-gridiron star—why they

just naturally decided to get married.”2 The cover features the

glamorous couple embracing (but not kissing) in front of the

Manhattan skyline.

Also following de Graff and Pocket Books was George

Delacorte Jr., who by the age of twenty-eight had built a profitable

business publishing mass-market magazines and comic books

through his company, Dell Publishing. Delacorte was known as a

man who understood what the general public wanted. By the

1940s they wanted paperbacks, and in 1943 Delacorte met the

demand. Dell, which had published such pulp magazines as I

Confess and Cupid’s Diary early on, concentrated on romances.

Typical titles included Afterglow by Ruby M. Ayres and reprints of

Faith Baldwin romances from the 1930s, such as The Moon’s Our

Home and Woman on Her Way. Dell continued to focus on

romances into the 1950s and 1960s. Its reprints of Victoria Holt’s

THE LOOK OF LOVE14

THE MILLS & BOON cover for I’ll Be with You, from 1943, is typical of the glamorous, subdued romancehardcovers of the early 1940s.

INTRODUCTION 15

popular Gothic romances in the 1960s played a significant role in

solidifying the romance paperback habit. Bantam, another

romance publisher, was founded in 1945 by Ian Ballantine, and

was home to such popular authors as Emilie Loring, Marguerite

Marshall, and Grace Livingston Hill. Over the decades other

paperback publishers followed suit: Ace, which published the

first modern Gothic novel, Pyramid, Fawcett, Signet, Monarch,

Valentine, Belmont, Macfadden, Magnum, Paperback Library,

and Airmont all published popular romance fiction.

Then, in 1949, a onetime fur trader for the Hudson Bay

Company and former mayor of Winnipeg named Richard H. G.

Bonnycastle founded a small Canadian paperback-only publish-

ing company: Harlequin. In its first year, Harlequin put out a line

of general fiction and educational materials, as well as a few

romance titles, including The Manatee: Strange Loves of a Seaman

and Honeymoon Mountain: Deborah Loses Her Innocence. Over the

next decade it published several more “nice little romances,” as

Bonnycastle’s wife, Mary, called them. She, along with Harlequin

secretary Ruth Palmour, initially read the manuscripts. Palmour

may also have illustrated some of the early covers. The romances

proved to be the company’s greatest asset, and Harlequin soon

found itself searching for a partner to provide content. Palmour

approached Mills & Boon, a British hardcover house, seeking

reprint rights to its popular romance titles, and in 1957

Harlequin began distributing Mills & Boon romances under its

own imprint—the first was Anne Vinton’s The Hospital in

Buwambo.

Founded in 1908 by Charles Boon and Gerald Mills, Mills &

Boon published sweet, but not spicy, romances and was known to

carefully monitor its authors and storylines. A Mills & Boon hero-

THE LOOK OF LOVE16

ine, for example, would not stay overnight in a man’s apartment

before marriage. The publisher also tended to avoid troublesome

subjects and situations. This approach matched Harlequin’s, and

made for a healthy relationship between the two publishers, who

both sought readers attracted to “wholesome” stories.

By 1964 Harlequin was publishing only romances, and the

wholesome heroine—honest, sincere, pure, and innocent—was its

signature. These books were nothing if not formulaic: the

Harlequin reader expected to follow the story, set in an exotic

locale, of a virginal young woman who falls in love with a man of

means. A tempestuous courtship would ensue with periods of

misunderstanding and uncertainty, but all would end well with a

wedding. The sexual element was subdued, limited to an

embrace or a kiss. Premarital or extramarital sex was absent

entirely. In 1972 Harlequin formally merged with Mills & Boon,

and began to publish original titles as well as reprints (still

adhering to its tried-and-true formula). With its acquisition of

Simon & Schuster’s Silhouette imprint in the 1980s, Harlequin

became the world’s leading publisher of romance fiction.

The success of the paperback romance phenomenon was pro-

pelled in no small measure by the exuberant covers that graced

these books. From the 1940s through the 1970s, romances were

illustrated by some of the most talented and sought-after illus-

trators in the publishing industry, most of them men. Such

notable graphic artists as Robert Maguire, Baryé Phillips, Robert

McGinnis, Gerald Gregg, Lou Marchetti, and Mitchell Hooks all

designed romance paperbacks. Their talent and rate of execution

were remarkable. Phillips, whose prodigious output of a cover

per day earned him the moniker “King of the Paperbacks,” is per-

haps best known for his 1958 cover for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

INTRODUCTION 17

While “quality” paperbacks, such as Dover Books, Penguin,

Anchor, and Vintage, were somewhat restrained in their cover

designs, mass-market books were generally bright and colorful.

As the historian Thomas L. Bonn has noted, “publishers became

convinced that they were competing as much with magazines as

with hardcover books. Consequently, paperbacks were increas-

ingly outfitted as ‘miniature magazines,’ to do battle for display

space.”3 Eye-catching and sometimes sensational, covers helped

them compete.

In stores, paperbacks were generally categorized by pub-

lisher. For example, all Bantam books—romances, mysteries, and

adventures—shared the same rack. This left publishers with two

problems: they had to distinguish their books from those of other

publishers, and they had to make clear distinctions between the

titles from different genres in their own lists. Standard cues for

romance books were pastel colors, flowers, and embracing cou-

ples. Several publishers followed the lead of Albatross, an

English paperback house that color-coded its covers blue for love

stories. Prior to the 1970s, when script became the type of choice,

the lettering on romance covers was indistinguishable from that

of other paperbacks, usually a simple serif or sans serif typeface.

The words employed said enough: “cherish,” “lover,” “mistress,”

and “memories” were typical.

Most genre fiction covers, romance included, depicted a sin-

gle scene from the book they advertised. Pulp-inspired art is evi-

dent in many romance covers (remember, they were created by

the same illustrators and art directors as other pulp fiction), but

in general romance covers maintained a certain level of dignity—

romance readers did not want scantily-clad femme fatales. This

may be the defining difference between a romance cover and a

lurid, “sleaze” cover for a pulp novel aimed at a male audience.

THE LOOK OF LOVE18

While the characters in both books may indeed end up in the

same place—the bedroom—there are no torn clothes or sordid

poses on the romance cover. At least not until the 1970s, and then

it was usually the man who bared his chest.

If the cover artists were generally realists in their drawing

styles, they managed to imbue their romance designs with

enough fantasy to make them appealing to women. If there was a

certain dependence on a set of cliché compositions—a hero and

heroine who gaze longingly into each other’s eyes; a contempla-

tive woman in the foreground with her lover milling around in

the background—publishers and readers seemed not to care.

Inevitably, the covers relate something of the period in

which they were drawn, particularly in regard to women’s roles

in society. Covers of the 1940s, especially those created during

World War II, allude to the preciousness of family and home. By

the time the war was over, heroines—with a newfound independ-

ence—were determined to take life less seriously. Postwar covers

often portray beautiful men and women on social escapades—

Young Man of Manhattan being a fine example of this type of jaun-

ty tale. Women also had marriage on their minds (when had they

not?), and many titles addressed the various complexities of

tying the knot. These covers often featured a woman looking anx-

ious or pensive.

Some of the most stunning covers of the 1940s were pro-

duced by Dell staff artist Gerald Gregg, who earned a reputation

for his exquisite airbrush technique. Calling his style a combina-

tion of graphic design and stylized realism, Gregg used contrasts

of light and shadow with the addition of a few bright colors to

accentuate particular features of his characters. Today, these and

other early Dell paperbacks are collected for their front covers as

well as the maps that appeared on their backs. Called “map-

INTRODUCTION 19

backs,” these early editions featured handsome plans that corre-

sponded to a principal scene or location in the book. Serious

about accuracy, Dell’s editors determined which part of the plot

in-house mapmaker Ruth Belew would depict. The maps quickly

became as much a part of the Dell identity as the company’s key-

hole logo, which was used to distinguish the various genres the

company published: for mysteries, the keyhole enclosed an eye;

for romances, a heart. In 1951, Dell replaced its unique maps with

conventional blurbs.

Making the difficult choice between man and career was a

standard travail for romance heroines during the 1950s. Covers

for these titles generally featured a heroine in her place of work,

often posed before an office window. By the 1960s it had become

readily apparent that medicine was the career of choice for

women readers. In 1961 alone, Harlequin titles included Doctor to

the Isles, Wife to Doctor Dan, Children’s Hospital, Nurse Angela,

Nurse Nolan, Nurse Templar, and Yankee Surgeon.

The doctor/nurse romances quickly became fixtures with

nearly all romance publishers, and by the late sixties the materi-

al had become so well-trodden that publishers were resorting to

the most unlikely of scenarios. Titles such as Everglades Nurse,

Settlement Nurse, and Jungle Nurse placed medical professionals

in bizarre predicaments and exotic locations, and the covers

often show the heroine in her uniform surrounded by a threaten-

ing landscape. Romance writers had fun with the nurse, often

merging her story with other typical romance themes, as in

Beauty Contest Nurse and Society Nurse.

Concurrent to the nurse/doctor phenomenon was the explo-

sion in popularity of Gothic romances. The demand for Gothics

grew to such proportions that by the late 1960s works of top

Gothic authors outsold the works of equivalent writers in all

THE LOOK OF LOVE20

other categories of paperback fiction, including mysteries, sci-

ence fiction, and Westerns. The Gothic romance covers were

easy to pick out: they nearly always featured a raven-haired beau-

ty at the fore and a mansion with a single light on in the back-

ground.

By the 1970s, the way women thought about themselves in

the workplace had begun to fundamentally change, and this was

reflected in the romance novel. “Heroines started hammering on

the glass ceiling in the 1970s,” according to Harlequin editor

Marsha Zinberg, “and sparks soon flew between men of the world

and smart, spirited women who had every intention of building

their careers.”4 The changing male/female power structure was

portrayed on the cover of Harlequin’s own Corporation Boss, by

Joyce Dingwell. The novel reads: “When they had first met,

Constance knew Anthony Vine had been interested in her. But

now that she had come to work with him at Corporation City in

the Northern Territory, he was cold and distant. What had gone

wrong between them, and was there anything she could do about

it?”5 More and more women were featured as bosses, not just

secretaries.

While Harlequin maintained its deliberately old-fashioned

art program, in the 1970s other romance publishers shifted

toward more explicit sexual content on their covers. As the late

1960s freed society from some of its hang-ups, what was consid-

ered “taboo” in the 1940s and 1950s hardly received a second

glance by the 1970s. Charming innuendo was lost; it wasn’t need-

ed anymore. You could feature a rapturous embrace, a passionate

kiss, or a man with his shirt off on the cover of a romance novel

without consequence. Previously, artists could only hint at lust,

which resulted in far more creative scenes, as on the cover of the

INTRODUCTION 21

PRIOR TO THE PULP magazine–inspired covers of the 1940s, many hardcoverromance books featured illustrations thatwere sweet and conservative, such as thisone for Secret Marriage.

THE LOOK OF LOVE22

AN EARLY DELL paperback, White Fawn fea-tures the publisher’s keyhole logo with aheart for romance. Hand-rendered letter-ing was unusual for most paperbacks,but Dell often featured it.